Goshen College: A Peace Church Goes to School

Just south of downtown Goshen, Indiana, a small liberal arts campus carries a tradition unlike any other college in the Midwest. Goshen College was born in eighteen ninety-four, not from a land grant or a wealthy donor, but from fear. Mennonite leaders in Elkhart County looked at their young people and saw them drifting away from the church and toward mainstream universities. Their answer was to build an institution of their own, founding what they called the Elkhart Institute of Science, Industry and the Arts with a group of fifteen ministers and laymen.

The school moved to Goshen in nineteen o three, when civic leaders there offered better facilities and room to grow. Within a few years the Mennonite Church took full ownership and rechristened it Goshen College. It became a four-year Mennonite college, and it embedded the distinctive values of the Anabaptist tradition directly into its curriculum.

Those values show up most dramatically in a requirement found at almost no other American college. For decades, Goshen students have been expected to complete what the school calls a Study-Service Term, a semester spent living with a host family in a developing country, attending classes in the morning and doing volunteer community work in the afternoon. Thousands of students have passed through the program, spending time in places from Honduras and Haiti to Senegal and Cambodia. The philosophy is straightforward: education without service is incomplete.

The campus also houses the Mennonite Historical Library, one of the most significant archives of Anabaptist and Mennonite scholarship in the world, and has long been home to the Mennonite Quarterly Review, a leading Mennonite scholarly journal.

The peace tradition runs through everything. Mennonites have been conscientious objectors in every American war since the Revolution, and Goshen College has trained generations of nurses, social workers, and relief workers who carried that witness into the world. In a county famous for RV manufacturing and industrial muscle, this quiet campus has been exporting a very different product for more than a century.